"Tom Purdom-Research Project" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

* * *


The reader's programming is state-of-the-art but it retreats to a bit of cowardly evasiveness -- Request
Information If Necessary -- when Jinny reaches the next few paragraphs. Fortunately, Jinny is one of
those children who feels she understands sex as well as she needs to. She understands the mechanics, in
other words, but she still hasn't learned why people do it.
***


The evening after the meeting, Postri-Dem spent most of his waking hours listening to three voices
squealing and murmuring in the next room. The partitions in the living quarters in the Martian groundbase
weren't much thicker than a pastry wafer.
Postri-Dem could have joined the trio in Kipi's room if he had wanted to. Kipi had made it clear she
was in that kind of mood. Every time he heard one of those squeals, images of squirming bodies and
happy faces pushed everything else out of his consciousness.
I won't claim they're the best quartet you could team up with, Stridi-If had said when she had
suggested he should fill out this particular Five. They're not the kind of people you can entertain with
a long lecture on the more fascinating aspects of the human economic system. But it's better than
lying in a room all by yourself daydreaming about your last stroking.
Postri-Dem was too old to be the "odd man" in a Five or Seven in which all the females already had
children. His younger brother had been permanently committed to a Seven for almost six Homeyears. His
brother had even fathered a child. Postri-Dem had belonged to six different Sevens since he had reached
sexual maturity. His relationships with three of them had all ended with the same scene: a visit from one of
the older women, and a gentle, carefully phrased announcement that he was a wonderful, interesting
person, and they all liked him very much, but...
That wasn't the exact wording they had used, obviously. But it's a reasonable translation. Postri-Dem's
relationships with his own species had been about as satisfying as a rejected thesis.
I once worked out a time line in which I compared events on the ifli starship with events on Earth. It
was easy to say the Chosen Presider's culture-segment had crossed forty-eight light years in two hundred
and six Earth years. But what did that mean when you tried to think about it as something that had
happened to thousands of highly intelligent civilized beings as they lived out their lives in a ship that was
essentially a miniature city? When they had left their home system over two centuries ago, it had been
1812 on Earth. Napoleon's soldiers had been suffering the agonies of the retreat from Moscow. Our
most advanced communication system had been the semaphore telegraph.
They had been traveling for eighty-eight years -- and they were still almost thirty light years from Earth
-- when the people of Europe and the Americas had greeted the first day of the twentieth century. They
had been almost twenty light years away -- and much of the human race had been involved in the second
military holocaust of the twentieth century -- when they had picked up the radio waves human civilization
had emitted into space in the 1920s. Verdi... Pasteur... Einstein... Fermi... Hawking... they had all lived
and died while the ship had been creeping toward the moment when we would suddenly realize that
something odd seemed to be moving through the solar system.
Postri-Dem had been fascinated by my time line. When he had shown it to Stridi-If, her only reaction
had been horror at the number of wars listed among the historical events.
Postri-Dem had been eleven when he had been snared by the questions that would turn him into a
scholar who spent most of his waking hours immersed in databanks and analytical programs. He had
been studying the basic facts about the evolution of his own species, with three other children his own
age. Most of the video transmissions the ship had been receiving from Earth had still been black and
white. The adults had all been terrified when their screens had confronted them with films and
documentaries that depicted the horrors that had taken place between September 1939 and August